Case Studies

The SMART partnership supports improved law enforcement and biological monitoring in protected areas around the world. They came to Refractions to build a software tool to help meet their needs.

Biodiversity BC and its government and non-government partners were looking for regional-level environmental statistics. Refractions proposed a new approach to generating GIS summaries, using the power of a relational database and web tools to provide GIS analysis to users who previously had no access to it.

The City of Vancouver collects water readings from thousands of residences and businesses, but has never optimized the pedestrian routes the readers take. Refractions developed algorithms to create the most efficient routes of the correct length for readers.

Refractions provides full-service support for the British Columbia Digital Roads Atlas – systems design, maintenance, data conflation, client service, and rapid response.

Refractions converted a legacy habitat modelling system based on ArcView 3.X to ArcGIS 9.2, and automated the workflow to provide faster turnaround time for model runs.

Line Cleaner – BC Ministry of Forests

The British Columbia Ministry of Forests needed a tool to conflate multiple roads databases into a single working layer. Refractions delivered the algorithms and a user interface based on the uDig platform.

Refractions developed an ArcMap extension to automate the calculation of standard reports joining a massive shape-file archive with a large Oracle database.

UN FAO needed a data collection tool that could run disconnected and didn't have a per-seat licensing cost. Refractions delivered a simple tool using the uDig desktop platform.

The Open Geospatial Consortium runs regular “testbed” projects to field-test new concepts in geospatial interoperability. Refractions was a part of the OWS-3 initiative, and built a uDig-based “GeoDSS” client to provide access to several other OGC standard services, including a prototype GeoVideo service.

Rento is a free web service that makes it easy to find a place to rent in Greece. Powered by PostgreSQL and PostGIS, it provides ad listings with photographs displayed on a map. Searching is accomplished through map navigation and natural language processing, with the search engine being capable of answering complex (spatial) questions such as "flat near the University of Athens" or "loft up to 800 euros near a metro station" (in greek).

The International Potato Center wanted to migrate their potato genetics modelling application to uDig and Eclipse RCP. Refractions prepared a one-week training course and delivered it on-site in Lima, Peru to a group of developers from around the world.

Western Forest Products wanted to move to an open source infrastructure to roll out internal data gathering applications. Refractions helped set up the initial infrastructure and built a template application for landslide reporting.

The Regional District was rolling out a new 911 dispatch system, and knew that keeping rural route address points accurate and up-to-date would involve collaboration with far-flung municipalities. Refractions built a web-based collaboration system using standard technology ready to integrate with the District ArcSDE system.

The US Army Corps of Engineers set up Mapserver to provide online viewing of their various inventories in Oracle Spatial. In order to provide access to an additional internal community of users with ArcMap8, they needed to make the data available using an ArcIMS internet service. Rather than re-configure their server back-end to support ArcIMS, they engaged Refractions to enhance the IMSEMU, a package the provides ArcIMS-compatible ArcXML services using the Mapserver rendering engine.

To integrate ocean observations with the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI), the British Columbia government contracted to build an OpenGIS™ standard portal. Refractions delivered a system that allowed on-the-fly discovery and viewing of WMS layers, on-the-fly re-styling of WMS layers, and session management. The system used ArcIMS, OpenIMF, J2EE, and Mapserver.

Refractions helped SANZ tune their database design and database queries to provide maximum performance and flexibility for their EarthWhere application suite.

Refractions integrated a mapping system based on the Mapserver open source web mapping engine into the existing VISTA on-line analytical (OLAP) data warehouse infrastructure. The new system acts as another “view” of the data, so any data query created in VISTA can now be viewed as a table, a chart, or a colorful thematic map.

Refractions built a web-based utility for searching boundaries over the web, using Oracle, ArcIMS, and IMF to provide an interactive map of the data.

AT&T Wireless needed to roll out web map services to a public audience, but their proprietary software was too slow and expensive to scale up. Refractions built a pilot project on open source software and free data that demonstrated a 10-fold performance increase and no licensing overhead.

The British Columbia Ministry of Health was charged with creating an access program to cover costs of medically necessary travel. But how much would it cost? Who was traveling for treatment? Where were they traveling to and from? Refractions analyzed 50 million records from the medical insurance database and delivered a report on travel patterns and interactive map application for exploring the data.

Refractions helped LAUSD add a mapping component to their OpenACS content management system. LAUSD had built an infrastructure tracking solution in OpenACS, but needed a mapping component, Refractions delivered one using open source components that integrated with the LAUSD technology.

Golder had a beta version of a environmental assessment application, but needed further development before it could be delivered to the clientn. Refractions provided the software expertise to get Golder's application completed and delivered on time.

Geographic Data BC needed a system to quality control planimetric mapping submissions from third parties. Refractions built a system that used FME to run quality operations and ArcView 3.X to provide a user interface for semi-automated manual operations.

Archaeology Branch had large number of bad records in their GIS coverage and database with poor linkages between the spatial and attribute sides of their system. Refractions analyzed their complete database algorithmically and generated a new clean coverage and database update script to bring the two sets into sychronization.

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